Labour’s tawdry smear tactics can’t disguise its absence of ideas

The Clegg/Cameron Coalition is about to enter its period of maximum danger. The economic recovery may be going into reverse. Unemployment is back on the rise, with the level of youth unemployment now at a record high. The spending cuts announced last year are at last beginning to bite, hard and painfully. To make matters worse, the cost of living is rising very sharply indeed, and an increase in national insurance is introduced with the start of the financial year next month.

Moreover, this May’s local and national elections will present the first major electoral test for the Coalition and the results will be dreadful – massive gains for Labour, a setback for the Conservatives, and a bloodbath for Nick Clegg’s Liberal Democrats. Indeed, opinion polls all concur that were a general election to be held tomorrow, the result would be annihilation for the Lib Dems, and a comfortable victory for Ed Miliband. This is deeply disconcerting for a Conservative Party that knows in its heart of hearts that it failed to win the general election.

However, there are various ways of judging a government, and arguably the least important is how it performs in the popularity stakes. History shows that again and again the greatest governments – such as Margaret Thatcher’s 1979-1990 administration – are obliged to endure long periods of public contempt. Meanwhile, some of our least successful administrations – Tony Blair provides a resonant recent example, Harold Wilson another – have enjoyed high ratings over comparatively long periods.

The rule also applies in opposition. Neil Kinnock, who led Labour from 1983 to 1992, was in many ways prodigiously successful. A genuinely warm man and outstanding orator, Kinnock articulated with clarity the national mood of protest and the tough and sometimes harsh measures imposed by Mrs Thatcher. However, he never quite managed to present himself as a plausible prime minister with a convincing programme for government. As a result, his high poll ratings turned out again and again to be misleading, and his popularity would melt away as general elections approached.

Serious evidence is starting to emerge that Ed Miliband, the new Labour leader, is making the same errors which ultimately doomed poor Kinnock. To his credit, Miliband has recovered from a poor start. He has established a high-calibre team around him. Likeable and talented, he is fast growing into his job, and indeed I would expect him to improve further.

Nevertheless, he has so far failed to develop anything resembling a worthwhile alternative political analysis. Like Kinnock, he is concentrating only on being the voice of opposition, as the events of the past few days show with disconcerting clarity.

Let’s take the crucial battleground of schools, where Michael Gove, the Education Secretary, is pressing forward with significant challenges to the entrenched, though disastrous, orthodoxies imposed by the British teaching establishment over the past 40 years.

Along with many others, I believed that Miliband’s decision to appoint Andy Burnham to shadow Gove was a skilful and forward-looking move. However, Burnham has repeatedly sided with the teaching unions and their dogmatic adherence to bankrupt methodologies.

An excellent example of his moribund approach concerns this week’s devastating report on British school standards from the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development. A detailed, impartial and rigorous survey, it demolished the idea that standards had risen sharply in the Blair/Brown years. In particular, the OECD debunked the proposition, repeatedly asserted by Labour ministers, that rising grades at A-level reflect better performance in the classroom.

In one lacerating passage, the OECD noted that “the share of A-level entries awarded grade A has risen continuously for 18 years and has roughly trebled since 1980”, before going on to add that “independent surveys of cognitive skills do not support this development”.

One would have expected Burnham, one of the more open-minded cabinet ministers in the last government, to have used such an authoritative report to distance himself from the failed policies of the past. Instead, he has sided with the trade unions and their blinkered opposition to Gove’s efforts to raise standards. Burnham’s appearance at Wednesday’s conference of the Association of School and College Leaders was an especially sad moment. He wore round his neck a placard saying “I failed the English Baccalaureate”. This is the slogan being used by the unions to reject Gove’s attempt to force children to gain a basic training in mainstream subjects – including English, maths, science, a language and either geography or history.

It is easy to explain what has gone wrong with Burnham. It is estimated that more than half of all Labour activists are schoolteachers or university academics. It would cause a convulsion within the party – and probably destroy Burnham’s political career – if he were to challenge them. As a result, Labour has sided with the teaching unions and against the public.

Welfare reform is a comparable case. Iain Duncan Smith is pressing forward with an audacious project to remodel the post-war welfare state, yet once again Miliband’s Labour is stuck in a previous era. Unlike Andy Burnham, Labour’s welfare spokesman, Liam Byrne, is too careful to oppose the Coalition reforms outright – and indeed, Labour MPs were ordered to abstain when voting on the second reading of the welfare bill last week.

Simultaneously, however, Miliband and Byrne appear to be pursuing a devious and dishonest private strategy. MPs and even front-bench spokesmen are being encouraged to trash the welfare reforms in private party meetings and (when they can get away with it) in the national media.

The most disgraceful example of the strategy concerns Liam Byrne’s deputy, Karen Buck. At a public meeting in Islington earlier this week, Miss Buck abandoned all front-bench discipline and claimed that the Government was using reforms to the benefit system to enforce a system of ethnic cleansing. This is what she said: “They don’t want ethnic minority women, and they don’t want Muslim women living in central London.” She also suggested that Coalition ministers were toying with eugenics and looking to prevent “middle- and lower-income women having children”. Since Miss Buck remains on the Labour front bench, one can only assume that these vile remarks were authorised.

It is easy to see what is going on here. Miliband has so far lacked the courage to challenge publicly the very important reforms being pushed through by Coalition ministers. In the absence of powerful and original ideas of his own, he is licensing his party to resort to smear and innuendo. This too is a familiar pattern to those who recall the Thatcher years. Neil Kinnock was never able to develop a convincing alternative to the radical policies of the government, so he resorted to a campaign of vilification. This strategy was surprisingly successful: it won votes and animated Labour activists. But it never won a general election, and poisoned British politics for many years. Ed Miliband, if he wants to be taken seriously as a potential prime minister, must put a stop to this ugly strategy.